That's right. My phone sends annoying text messages to my friends if I don't log a workout by 3PM. Try it yourself . To add friends as spam targets, write "Tattle." somewhere in their contact notes. Use "Automations" in the Shortcuts app to trigger it on a recurring schedule. It's strange how this motivates me -- I'm not seeking encouragement nor validation here. My brain simply converts the situation to "I must do pushups to save my friends from my spam robot". Whatever works. Tha...

In 2024 I built a Pi Frigate NVR with Axzez's Interceptor 1U Case , and installed it in my 19" rack. Using a Coral TPU for object detection, it's been dutifully surveilling my property—on my terms (100% local, no cloud integration or account required). I've wanted to downsize the setup while keeping cheap large hard drives 1 , and an AI accelerator. In 2024 I built a Pi Frigate NVR with Axzez's Interceptor 1U Case , and installed it in my 19" rack. Using a Coral TPU for object de...

Phew, what a month! February may be shorter but that’s not diminished the wealth of truly interesting posts I’ve found to share with you this month. Phew, what a month! February may be shorter but that’s not diminished the wealth of truly interesting posts I’ve found to share with you this month. Phew, what a month! February may be shorter but that’s not diminished the wealth of truly interesting posts I’ve found to share with you this month. Phew, what a month! February m...

WASHINGTON (February 26, 2026) — Shield AI, the deep‑tech company building state‑of‑the‑art autonomy software products and aircraft, today announced its mission autonomy software, Hivemind, successfully completed its first flight test aboard Anduril’s YFQ-44A aircraft. The flight test builds on the U.S. Air Force’s recent selection of Shield AI as a mission autonomy provider for its Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program after a competitive evaluation to support Technology M...

I gave a talk this weekend at Social Science FOO Camp in Mountain View. The event was a classic unconference format where anyone could present a talk without needing to propose it in advance. I grabbed a slot for a talk I titled "The State of LLMs, February 2026 edition", subtitle "It's all changed since November!". I vibe coded a custom macOS app for the presentation the night before. I've written about the last twelve months of development in LLMs in December 2023 , December 2024 and D...

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Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Alex Bellos in Oxford. Among other things Bellos writes the Guardian Monday puzzle column . He gave me a copy of his latest book, Puzzle Me Twice , where the obvious answer is not correct. I got more right than wrong, but I hated being wrong. Here is one of those puzzles, Sistery Mystery (page 28), which is a variation of a puzzle from Rob Eastaway .  Puzzle 1:  Suppose the probability of a girl is 51% independently and uniformly over all children. In...

Anthropic recently released a blog post with the description of an experiment in which the last version of Opus, the 4.6, was instructed to write a C compiler in Rust, in a “clean room” setup. The experiment methodology left me dubious about the kind of point they wanted to make. Why not provide the agent with the ISA documentation? Why Rust? Writing a C compiler is exactly a giant graph manipulation exercise: the kind of program that is harder to write in Rust. Also, in a clean room expe...

This is an event post. My individual talk page is here: Get your tickets while they last! This is an event post. My individual talk page is here: Get your tickets while they last! This is an event post. My individual talk page is here: Get your tickets while they last!

When did saying Teas and Seas or T&Cs become a permitted truncation of terms and conditions? I hear and see it everywhere now. Gambling operators and whisky companies can’t legally truncate gamble responsibly or drink responsibly , so why can people advertise that Teas and Seas apply? It’s so weird. Saying that terms and conditions apply is a legal requirement, isn’t it? Otherwise why would they say it? I guess they think it’s legally defensible on the grounds everyone k...

In the United States, we are losing our fondness for cash. As in many other countries, cards and other types of electronic payments now dominate everyday commerce. To some, this is a loss. Cash represented a certain freedom from intermediation, a comforting simplicity, that you just don't get from Visa. It's funny to consider, then, how cash is in fact quite amenable to automation. Even Benjamin Franklin's face on a piece of paper can feel like a mere proxy for a database transaction. How differ...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Dominik Schwind, whose blog can be found at lostfocus.de . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? My name is Dominik Schwind and I'm from Lör...

I don’t tend to post links to videos here, as I can’t stand watching videos to learn about things . But some talks are worth a watch, and I do suggest this overview on how organizations are currently using AI by Laura Tacho. There’s various nuggets of data from her work with DX: 92.6% of devs are using AI assistants devs reckon it’s saving them 4 hours per week 27% of code is written by AI without significant human intervention AI cuts onboarding time by half T...

It’s hard to get optimizers right. Even if you build up a painstaking test suite by hand, you will likely miss corner cases, especially corner cases at the interactions of multiple components or multiple optimization passes. I wanted to see if I could write a fuzzer to catch some of these bugs automatically. But a fuzzer alone isn’t much use without some correctness oracle—in this case, we want a more interesting bug than accidentally crashing the optimizer. We want to see if the optimi...

Against Query Based Compilers Feb 25, 2026 Query based compilers are all the rage these days, so it feels only appropriate to chart some treacherous shoals in those waters. A query-based compiler is a straightforward application of the idea of incremental computations to, you guessed it, compiling. A compiler is just a simple text transformation program, implemented as a lot of functions. You could visualize a run of a compiler on a particular input source code as a graph of functio...

We talked a couple issues ago about the application of Linearity of Expectation to building intuition about Copysets , and the ways that we're both constrained and freed by the laws of probability. Evan recently pointed out a cool paper and writeup to me that can be understood in a similar way. Here's the problem as he described it to me: This is a really basic idea: generate unique IDs, in this case, that are going to be embedded in RocksDB SST files. The goal: don't have collis...

There’s a moment, just before the tight mass of cells that is a developing mouse embryo implants itself in the womb, that it all comes apart. Hundreds of tiny fluid-filled bubbles expand between each of the orb’s few dozen cells. The bubbles grow and press outward on cell membranes — and then, in a moment of fracture, pry them apart. Thin protein strands tether the cells together as the… Source There’s a moment, just before the tight mass of cells that is a developing mouse embryo i...

Nice to see that the Firefox team have actually implemented their "AI killswitch" in the way that they said they would. Here's a screenshot from my copy of Firefox 148: Very happy to see this land, and it means I can end my hunt for a new browser for the time being. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comm...

really easy tetris I made really easy tetris - it's tetris with just the I pieces. Play it here . This game was primarily me understanding how the Phaser game engine worked and figuring out whether I wanted to use it in the future, but I had enough fun playing it that I figured I'd put it online. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/really-easy-tetris really easy tetris I made really easy tetris - it's tetris with just the I...

I know you’ve read 1000s of articles about “Vibe Coding” and how it changes lives (or ruins them) already, but this one is going to be slightly different. After spending a year in this industry, I’ve realized that there’s two different types of vibe coding: Vibe coding by individuals – usually done to chase startup dreams, 99% of which will never materialize. Characterized by a lack of domain insight or a real, pressing business problem to solve. I’ll call this “Ungu...

We’ll be working with the set P_n(\mathbb{R}) , real polynomials of degree \leq n . Such polynomials can be expressed using n+1 scalar coefficients a_i as follows: \[p(x)=a_0+a_1 x + a_2 x^2 + \cdots + a_n x^n\] Vector space The set P_n(\mathbb{R}) , along with addition of polynomials and scalar multiplication form a vector space . As a proof, let’s review how the vector space axioms are satisfied. We’ll use p(x) , q(x) and r(x) as arbitrary polynomials from the set P...

When I was in high school, I used to keep a pencil or pen up my sleeve. I don’t remember anyone else doing it, or why I started. But if I had a pen up my sleeve, I would at least know I had one nearby for when I’d need one. (I may be mis-remembering whether having a pen up my sleeve actually helped me remember one (oh the irony!). I remember a lot of times that I would forget a pen or a pencil. My organisational skills are better now, although still more on the chaotic side than I would like...

I’ve spent way more hours than I’d like to admit debugging context canceled and context deadline exceeded errors. These errors usually tell you that a context was canceled, but not exactly why. In a typical client-server scenario, the reason could be any of the following: The client disconnected A parent deadline expired The server started shutting down Some code somewhere called cancel() explicitly Go 1.20 and 1.21 added cause-tracking functions to the context package ...